Flyers are cheap to print and expensive to get wrong, because you usually only find out after a thousand of them are sitting in a box.
These are the five mistakes we see most often, and all of them are avoidable.
MISTAKE 1: NO BLEED, OR TEXT TOO CLOSE TO THE EDGE
Paper shifts very slightly when it is cut. If your background colour stops exactly at the edge of the page, you get a thin white line down one side of some of them.
The fix is to extend any background 3mm past the trim on every side, and to keep all text at least 5mm inside it. This single point causes more reprints than anything else on this list.
MISTAKE 2: LOW RESOLUTION IMAGES
An image that looks perfectly sharp on your screen can be a quarter of the resolution it needs for print. Screens are forgiving. Paper is not.
You want 300dpi at the final printed size. A photograph pulled off a website or sent through a messaging app has almost always been compressed and will print soft and blocky.
MISTAKE 3: TOO MUCH ON THE PAGE
A flyer gets about two seconds. If someone cannot tell what it is about in that time, it goes in the bin with everything else.
One clear headline, one image that supports it, three or four lines of supporting text, and one obvious thing to do next. That is a flyer. Everything else belongs on your website or in a brochure.
MISTAKE 4: FORGETTING THE CALL TO ACTION
It sounds obvious, and it is still missing from a surprising number of flyers that reach us. People read it, like it, put it down and have no idea what to do.
Put the one action you want on there clearly, whether that is a phone number, a WhatsApp number, a website or an address. Then make sure it is big enough to read at arm’s length.
MISTAKE 5: ORDERING FAR TOO MANY
The unit price drops as you order more, and that tempts everybody. But 5,000 flyers for an event where 400 people will walk past is not a saving, it is 4,600 flyers in your storeroom.
Digital printing makes short runs affordable. Order what you need, see whether it works, then reprint. You can also fix the mistakes you spot in round one.
A FEW SMALLER ONES WORTH KNOWING
- Colours set up in RGB instead of CMYK, which print duller than they looked
- Large areas of solid dark colour on uncoated paper, which absorb ink and go patchy
- Folding brochures laid out without allowing for the panel that folds inwards being slightly narrower
- Printing a date on something you will want to reuse
- Nobody proofreading it, which we have all done once
THE SIMPLEST PROTECTION
Ask for a proof and read it properly, out loud, before you approve the run. Then get one other person to read it too.
If you would rather someone else handled the technical side entirely, our design team sets up print ready artwork every day, and our print service checks files before anything goes on a machine. Get in touch.